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An innovative printer head may lead to affordable printers that spew out a thousand pages per minute, its developers say.

Such printers could lead to fast, high-quality photo printing as well as on-demand printed media, say the researchers.

Imagine customised newspapers and magazine and instant books printed by a vending machine.

"Think of such a machine in an airport terminal. You slide your credit card, chose a [book] for your flight, and get it warm from the printer in less than a minute," says Dr Moshe Einat, senior lecturer at the College of Judea and Samaria in Ariel, Israel, and team member.

The JeTrix printer head, invented by colleague Nissim Einat and team, could be on the market in two years in printers costing U$500-U$1000, the researchers say.

The machine could reduce backups at the office printer too.

Today, even the best printers used for business purposes cost thousands of dollars and max out at about 50 pages per minute.

The speed is limited, in part, by the printer head. For starters, it's usually much smaller than the page and takes time to scan back and forth while applying the ink.

Nozzle redesign

The other challenge has to do with the nozzles.

The ink is typically pooled in a main reservoir and distributed through a chamber, or manifold, that has many branching tubes, each leading to a nozzle.

To get uniform drops, the pressure of the ink in this system must be precisely regulated and maintained, a delicate task that becomes more difficult as the number of nozzles and the size of the nozzle array increases.

Overcoming obstacles

The JeTrix overcomes conventional limitations in two ways. First, it does not have a main reservoir or manifold that requires delicate pressure maintenance. Second, it is not limited by size. In fact, it can be as large as piece of paper and theoretically has a nozzle for every pixel.

The difference has to do with the way Einat and his team built the printer head. They turned to the same technology used to manufacture computer chips, etching the printer head out of silicon wafer chips.

Instead of a small array of nozzles that makes many scans to print a page, the design is a flat, 2D panel designed to be as big as the page and eject all of the necessary ink simultaneously.

Although the approach has a number of innovative features, it also has limitations says Dr Ross Allen, an internationally recognised technologist based in St Helena, California, who has 40 patents in imaging and printing technology.

"Inkjet print heads typically make two to eight passes over the same pixel row in order to hide any defects caused by nozzles that don't operate or meet drop ejection specifications," says Allen.

"If Einat's print head lays down all of the ink at once, the printed page could show artefacts or flaws from 'bad' nozzles."